https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/
The legacy parties continued to decline and the populist right advanced only so far. Now, the pro-EU left, which gained ground, may grow more assertive.
Sunday’s results in the European Parliament elections are like a clever modernist painting, apparently formal, abstract, and meaningless, which as you move back from it, looks increasingly like a busy city street with cars, taxis, buses, and people going quite clearly in their different directions. You can even guess where some of the drivers will end up. Similarly, if you step back and glance at the election returns with, as yet, not a great deal of exit-polling data on which to base deeper judgments, you will probably reach these preliminary conclusions:
1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.
